SACRAMENTO — A new version of the guidelines steering the country’s national parks would tilt the balance between preservation of some of the country’s most pristine wilderness and their recreational use, critics of the plan charged Monday.

The National Park Conservation Association invited the pub-

lic to comment on the 200-page National Park Service management plan, hoping to foster debate on the proposed draft, which it says cuts back on protection of park resources. Meanwhile, it opens the door to snowmobile rides, mountain biking and other activities that might impinge on wildlife and the silence of the backcountry, the group says.

Park service officials contend the new plan still has, at its core, the mission laid out in the 1916 act that created national parks “to conserve the scenery and … the wildlife therein and to provide for the enjoyment of the same in such manner … as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.”

The proposed draft doesn’t open the parks up to new activities, but allows park superintendents to consider changes in the way the public wants to use the park, said David Barna, chief of public affairs for the National Park Service.

“The park service has had a just-say-no policy,” Barna said, explaining the new policy would allow superintendents to evaluate possible changes against studies of their potential impact.

The number of park visitors has increased by 5 to 10 million every year since the system was created. Last year, about 277 million people used the parks, and the visitors’ desire to enjoy the land in new ways should be considered, Barna said.

This draft is a revision of a contentious earlier version, which was retracted in October after generating vocal opposition from environmentalists and former park employees. That version had stated that for activities to be forbidden in a park, officials had to show it would cause irreversible harm.

With less than two weeks left in the 90-day public period, critics say this version will make it harder for superintendents to stand in the way of change that could disrupt parks.

Phrases have been replaced with other, less stringent wording, raising the bar on the disruption that is acceptable before the Park Service forbids a certain activity.

For example, the new version substitutes “the National Park Service will preserve, to the greatest extent possible, the natural soundscapes of the park” with the National Park Service will “restore degraded soundscapes whenever practicable and will protect natural soundscapes from degradation due to unacceptable noise.”

In another instance, a phrase reading “the Service will not knowingly authorize a park use that would cause negative or adverse impacts unless it has been fully evaluated,” was replaced by “when a use is causing or would cause unacceptable impacts, the Service will seek first to manage the use in a way that will eliminate unacceptable impacts and when necessary, restrict or disallow the activity.”

Barna described the changes as affecting the “tone” of the document rather than leading to any real changes noticeable to park users.

But critics such as Ron Sundergill, NPCA’s Pacific regional director, said the new wording can alter park superintendents’ ability to enforce policy.

“They seem subtle, but when you have to take this to a court, these kinds of word changes can make a big difference,” Sundergill said.

Many former park service employees are concerned as well, saying the new document weakens the parks’ mission to preserve natural resources.

“All it does is confuse management, when there is a conflict between visitor use and preservation, on just how strong our mandate to preserve is,” said Becky Mills, who worked for the Park Service for 24 years.

During her tenure as manager of Great Basin National Park in Nevada, Mills said she was able to resist the building of an air strip next to park boundaries.

“You could hear a raven’s wings flapping overhead, and the airstrip would have changed that,” she said. “With these new policies, I probably would not have been able to take that stand.”

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